Orthography and Respelling in Teaching Spanish

ing the patterns on the fly, as it were. It would be possible, of course, to use tie lines as a clue that the three a's of ?Que va a hacer? represent only one [a] in normal colloquial speech, but students seem to react to this as meaning length. Other problems, of less consequence than those discussed above, include the fact that the orthography encourages the pronunciation of v as different from /b/ in its two allophones [b] and [b]; that it disguises the morphophonemic alternations among the nasalsJuan viene [hw~mbydn&i], invierno [imbydrnob], enviar [6mbyrfl], etc., and that it tempts some students to pronounce dead letters in guerra, hotel. Whatever one's feeling about these difficulties that the orthography introduces into student pronunciation,3 the difficulties that arise because important linguistic facts are omitted from orthographical indication must be acknowledged to be considerable. These omissions include pitch, juncture, and stress. Pitch levels are not marked in any way, even if certain contours can be said to be shown by punctuation-we say if, because as far as we can determine, no single meaningful contour is consistently and unambiguously marked by punctuation. Juncture is also indicated by punctuation sometimes, but by no means unambiguously. And even stress, for the largely unambiguous marking of which Spanish orthography is justly respected, is shown on the word level only, not on the phrase level where it is really important (since very few utterances are just a word). An example of the omission of pitch levels4 which results in ambiguity might be this one: The spelling Va al centro? represents both of the following utterances, which are quite different in meaning

Linguistics · Orthography · Reading (process) · Philosophy · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

• Stress on Normally Unstressed Elements

  Dwight Bolinger, Dwight L Bolinger•Hispania•1956

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